1. You need customer personas, just like you need buyer personas. Personalization hinges on them! –Ardath Albee, Marketing Interactions 2. Content innovation comes from all around us. Find that thing that inspires you and apply it to your industry. –Ann Handley, MarketingProfs 3. Social is the gasoline that fuels content. –Jay Baer, Youtility 4. Strategically “eavesdropping” or listening, like HiltonSuggests, can help provide utility and value regardless of transactional exchange. –Jay Baer

5. The future of content is visual, real-time, mobile, human and cross-platform. Find out what contributes to a moment of inquiry becoming a lead. –Lee Odden, TopRank Online 6. Behind every successful content marketing program is a home-run piece. –Doug Kessler, Velocity 7. Customers are a wonderful test bed for floating new ideas! Chances are if they get excited; others will, too! –Ardath Albee8. Leverage research and feast on the content. Slice, dice, tweak, and tweet it. -Todd Wheatland, Kelly Services 9. Keep in mind the ‘5 rings of buyer insight’ (priority initiatives; success factors; perceived barriers; buyer’s journey; decision criteria) – Adele Revella, Buyer Persona Institute 10. “If you don’t have the room to fail, you don’t have the right to grow.” – Jonathan Mildenhall, Coca-Cola

marketingIO's insight:

Some of the aforementioned are Seth-ish, but there are a few that are worthy of further investigate, e.g., #1, #9

Marketers now have a lot more avenues to target potential customers. At the forefront of that is social media. And if we’re talking about the highest-quality leads, LinkedIn is the clear winner. It’s a bit shocking, I know. You expect a giant like Facebook to be leading the pack. Not in this case. More than 80% of B2B leads sourced from social media come from LinkedIn.

marketingIO's insight:

Facebook quickly moving up the charts. But as usual...TEST!

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The Modern Marketing Model (M3) now creates a new framework for applying this thinking within organisations. The Modern Marketing Model is a unifying force which fuses digital and classic marketing into one future-facing framework. This informs marketing’s remit, required competencies and organisational design. M3 defines marketing in the digital age.

marketingIO's insight:

Requires registration.

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Technographics is about understanding a company's tech stack. And that goes beyond the outward-facing tech tools used to manage websites and marketing automation. That so-called digital exhaust is relatively easy to pick up, but it doesn't shed light on all the core technologies used to run the business – the systems of record that form the backbone for virtually all-important operations.In addition to providing information on a company’s tech stack, technographics also help identify other important insights such as when a particular technology might have been purchased, how long it’s been in use, and where it is being used.Your competitive sweet spot is where firmographics and demographics intersect with technographics , helping you identify your best-selling opportunities—whether you're offering a compatible or competitive solution. To your customers and prospects, this means you’re no longer pushing hit-or-miss messages at them. Rather, you're able to build proactive, results-oriented messages and solutions from the grassroots up in response to your understanding of their real needs.

marketingIO's insight:

Strictly for tech firms selling into the B2B environment.

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Mediocre product marketing. This is such an important barrier to marketing and sales success that I will write about it in detail in the next few weeks. Basically, the person(s) who owns product marketing is responsible for a number of important functions, whose critical failures will become apparent when technology is introduced.

Organizational roadblocks."

marketingIO's insight:

Add: poor data, lack of in-house skills.

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HubSpot Content Strategy is an SEO and content tool with an integrated growth methodology. As a result, the platform has several unique features, including:

Organize Content Into Topic Clusters – Designed to help marketers organize their content process into topics and adapt to the way modern search words.Content Recommendations – Content Strategy can recommend content ideas that marketers should create based on topics and subtopics.Content Optimization – The tool aims to help marketers optimize individual pieces of content and the overall structure of an entire topic cluster. This involves surfacing optimization advice for thin content, low-quality inbound links, lack of links between a subtopic and pillar page and more.Track The ROI Of Your Content – Content Strategy is designed to help marketers see how many leads and customers are being generated from each topic cluster so they can track the ROI of their content creation and overall strategy.

marketingIO's insight:

Important feature for the application, and a precursor to AI.

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According to my valuation model, the stock is currently overvalued by about 95%, trading at $74.5 compared to my intrinsic value of $38.23. This means that the buying opportunity has probably disappeared for now. If you like the stock, you may want to keep an eye out for a potential price decline in the future. Given that HUBS’s share is fairly volatile (i.e. its price movements are magnified relative to the rest of the market) this could mean the price can sink lower, giving us another chance to buy in the future. This is based on its high beta, which is a good indicator for share price volatility.

marketingIO's insight:

FWIW. On solid ground.

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In addition to the slew of new products announced at Ignite, Microsoft’s enterprise technology conference in Orlando, the company also unveiled its plans for Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business. As rumored earlier this month, the former will supplant the latter. Microsoft Teams will become the core communications client in Office 365, eventually replacing the current Skype for Business client, though the company didn’t give a specific timeframe.

Microsoft Teams launched worldwide in March as part of Office 365. The company has been furiously updating it ever since, including as recently as earlier this month with guess access.

marketingIO's insight:

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Microsoft is tapping the power of AI to provide customers of its Dynamics 365 business applications suite with new features. The company announced a series of capabilities at its Ignite conference today focused on bringing intelligence to business processes, including a pre-built chatbot designed to field customer service queries.

marketingIO's insight:

Major vendor #2 coming out with chatbots. Inevitable.

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ProsperWorks, which provides a customer relationship manager (CRM) for G Suite (formerly Google Apps for Work), announced today that is has raised $53 million to take on industry giant Salesforce. Norwest Venture Partners led the round, with participation from new investor GV (formerly Google Ventures), and returning investors Industry Ventures, Next World Capital, Storm Ventures, and True Ventures.

Founded in 2013, the San Francisco-based startup focuses on helping sales managers and reps better manage their teams and workflows through integration with apps like Gmail, Google Contacts, and Google Calendar. According to ProsperWorks cofounder and CEO Jon Lee, the number one priority is to make CRM more usable.

marketingIO's insight:

Not screwing around! Whatever happened to that Google/SFDC relationship?

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PCMag: Where do you think AI and ML will take MA over the next five years? What new features and opportunities will they give marketers?

Michelle Huff of Act-On: ML will act as marketers' co-pilot in their decision making and campaign execution process. AI will influence when, what, and where to engage with buyers and customers, predetermined by ML that can consume, digest, and compute mounds of data and turn it into actionable triggers and marketing activities. Essentially being able to predict and tailor outreach down to the best message, at the perfect time, and across the ideal communication channel.

AI will build on the foundation MA provides—a centralized engine for tracking, scoring, measuring, connecting, and learning from interactions with prospects and customers—and, ultimately, will give its users a way to anticipate and adapt engagement to their buyers' behaviors and actions.

marketingIO's insight:

And this will all belong to the Sales and Marketing Ops group, reporting into Sales.

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Here are five takeaways from the playbook that every CMO should consider as they lead their teams:

1. Exercise your financial muscles. Do whatever it takes to ensure you and your team are able to translate your activities to the top and/or bottom line in the right language.

2. Represent brand purpose and hold the line.

3. Culture is King. Period.

4. Before you invest in one more campaign, invest in your team, and yourself. Providing the right tools, training, and development opportunities for your entire team, including you, is essential for survival not just a nice-to-have. I’m not talking about technical skills – you’ll have a long list of those that will continuously evolve — but soft skills that will help everyone on your team tap into their true potential and work better together.

5. Everyone needs help, so ask for it.

marketingIO's insight:

#1 and #4, yes. Other than that, there's debate.

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What are the best indicators that a B2B target is in the market for new technology or products?

Skidmore: The greatest predictor of a company’s next technology purchase is the tech they own today. That idea is true of most industries. Prior experience is the greatest predictor of future actions. So, you can segment those [variables] and then look for signals from target customers as to whether they are in [the buying cycle]. That’s one of the things about overwhelming amounts of information—you need to be able to identify which pieces of information are the most valuable to your company now. We create scores of likelihood to purchase based on a wide range of variables.

marketingIO's insight:

It's amazing how B2B marketers continue to make the same mistakes. It's institutional insanity.

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Chart of the Day: The popularity of different martech stack components You will know that our options for using online services to manage marketing and get. Marketing topic(s):Managing marketing technology. Advice by Dave Chaffey.

marketingIO's insight:

I suggest you examine the blue and green as one unit of measurement, and what strikes me is the lack of inroads from the more complex technologies, e.g., MVT.

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Here are some responsible steps marketing operations practitioners can take when faced with a technology challenge or limitation.

1) Schedule Time with Your Tech Providers to Discuss their Product Roadmaps2) See if another part of your stack can solve it3) Reach out to peers to Ask how they’ve solved it4) Implement a “Bridge” Solution or Process

marketingIO's insight:

Marketers can find great creativity in MarTech: you're not stuck with the functionality provided by the vendor. Get creative.

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We analyzed over 3.5 billion Twitter ad impressions from January to June 2017. Based on our data, we saw CPMs increase from $5.30 to $6.72 during the first six months of 2017, while the average CPC increased from $0.52 to $0.80.

Twitter’s CPM increased by 27% since January 2017.The average CPC on Twitter increased by 18% since January 2017.The average CTR on Twitter remained consistent month-over-month between February and June.

marketingIO's insight:

All the more important to test across a variety of networks, especially LI and FB.

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Create the content you want to sponsor. It could be a post that you have already shared on your LinkedIn company page, or you can create a new post (known as direct sponsored content) and this post will not be shared on your company page. I will walk you through both of these approaches.Create a Lead Gen Form template.Choose your targeting option.Define your budget, bid, and schedule.Hit publish.

marketingIO's insight:

Simple and direct blueprint to follow. If you're new to LinkedIn advertising, this is an excellent place to start.

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Agree upon & set specific goalsIdentify important pages for conversionsPerform a site crawl to uncover technical opportunitiesEmploy Covey's time management gridProvide consistent benchmarks and reports

marketingIO's insight:

The worksheet associated with this article is a great place to start prioritizing.

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The rule of thirds is one of the first principles that all graphic designers, videographers, photographers and other creative roles learn. It’s a basic guideline for framing and image composition that results in the viewer seeing a balanced, more naturally flattering image.

To apply the rule, take your image and divide it into three parts vertically and again horizontally (it should look similar to a tic-tac-toe board.)

The rule states that the audience’s eye is naturally more drawn to the areas of the image nearest the intersection points. So, when you’re designing an image for a landing page, a social post, a PowerPoint slide, or even if you’re shooting a video, be sure to put the most important pieces of your image near these intersection points.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.